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Meet Radhika Duggal, CMO of Super (formerly Snapcommerce).
Under Radhika’s leadership as CMO, Super has become a trailblazer in mobile commerce across travel, retail, and fintech and a savings partner. With over 20 years of brand and growth marketing experience, her mission is to create and execute marketing strategies that drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty, while aligning with the company's vision, values, and goals. She specializes in building and leading multidisciplinary teams that leverage research and insights to deliver positioning, messaging, and award-winning campaigns that resonate with diverse audiences and markets. Radhika also currently serves as an adjunct professor of consumer behavior at NYU Stern School of Business and was previously the Managing Director, Chief Marketing Officer of Growth Financial Products at Chase.
Super is the all-in-one savings super app for everyday Americans looking to save money, access credit, and experience more of what life has to offer. The company is backed by tier 1 investors including NBA superstar, Steph Curry, has raised over $150M USD, saved over 7M customers $150M+ and 100k hours in shopping time through the app, and has surpassed $1B in sales.
Q: Tell us a bit about your background and what you're working on now.
I have the privilege of working as the Chief Marketing Officer at Super.com. Super.com is a fintech and ecommerce company that aims to help everyday Americans earn money, save money, and build credit. Like most roles, mine changes on a day-to-day basis, but some of the most exciting projects I'm working on include:
- Ideating and working with my team to execute additional ways to drive profitable revenue growth across our super app and travel products; we're very focused on channel diversification.
- Working with my team to stand up our CRM channel and turn it into a revenue generating platform and an engagement driver.
- Considering how best to drive mid and upper funnel awareness of our growing company so that one day, Super.com is a household name.
- Working across the company to ensure we're focused on building the best possible experience for our customers - which often starts with knowing who they are, their unmet needs, and measuring our progress towards meeting their needs.
Prior to joining Super.com, I had intentionally built my marketing career to see and experience different facets of marketing because I believe strongly that a marketing leader needs to be well-rounded. There's no such thing as an "artist" OR a "scientist" - a CMO needs to be able to excel at both data-driven and creative disciplines. Given that, I've worked across acquisition, brand, research, and customer experience as a management consultant serving Fortune 500 companies, as a marketer at startups, and as a marketer at Fortune 100 companies (JP Morgan Chase and Pfizer), I have the benefit of drawing on the skills and experiences I've learned. In those very different environments, I was able to build relationships with folks of very different backgrounds and navigate the challenges in the startup ecosystem today.
Q: How are you working on attracting the right customers and building your company's brand?
The first thing we do to ensure we attract the right customers is to ensure that we know who that "right customer" is. We've spent real time and effort aligning across the business on our design target, TAM, and the personas that most accurately exemplify that design target. Next, we ensure that the whole company, regardless of their title or team, "dog food" our product and walk in our customers shoes so they can understand if we're truly solving our customers' problems and what we need to do to do better.
We're off to the races building our company's brand. That started with renaming and rebranding the company, rebranding the Snapcommerce brand into Super.com last year. Since then, we did the following:
- Purchased the URL super.com and launched our company's home page, an homage to our brand and the values we stand for.
- Tested various brand activations including a 2023 Super Bowl commercial.
- Built comprehensive brand guidelines to ensure brand consistency across all assets across the company.
- Implemented a PR and social media function from the ground up. Check out a few of our viral videos here:
Q: Have you had any obstacles in your career and how did you overcome them?
Like most folks, I've had many obstacles in my career. The key to overcoming most obstacles, in my opinion, is building resilience - essentially, the ability to bounce back after a challenge. I've built resilience by using three clear steps each time I've had a challenge:
1 - Controlling what I could.
2 - Adapting my expectations and outputs to the situation at hand.
3 - Being persistent and never giving up.
Q: What's your advice to someone starting out in the marketing field?
- Build a capability for resilience because marketing is an ever-changing, not particularly well understood multifaceted discipline. You'll need to continually prove your worth and a capability for resilience will help you pick yourself up each time things don't go as planned.
- Intentionally develop a well-rounded career. Marketing is so multifaceted and while many proport that marketers are either "the artist" or "the scientist", the reality is you have to be both. Great marketers understand how to touch the minds and hearts of consumers by marrying the data driven with the creative.
- Read everything. The discipline changes so often with new channels and new methodologies. Acting as a consummate student will enable you to keep up and capture the benefits of fast-changing trends.
Q: Can you share the most important marketing tactic that you would recommend to any CMO that could be used universally in any industry/space?
Paid search is the most basic (and critical) marketing tactic I would recommend to any marketer. While not the most imaginative, it should be a tool in every marketer's toolkit because:
1 - It optimizes for consumer behavior. Most consumers in almost any industry search for branded and unbranded keywords; bidding on search terms means your brand and company will be top of mind when they do so.
2 - It's a highly intent-driven channel. It will serve up your brand and company when the customer is "in the market" for your product.
3 - It's highly measurable and optimizes your budget with clear, trackable metrics.
While paid search is a tactic I recommend every marketer use as part of their toolkit, a critical strategy is of equal importance. Understanding, documenting, and being able to articulate your purpose is crucial. What is purpose? It's your company's reason for being outside of making money and the typical business goals you have.
It's especially critical for CMOs and leadership teams to be able to articulate why that purpose is important to your founders, team and your customers since they're the folks who will truly tell the story. This should be the foundation of your marketing strategy as a Cone/Porter Novelli Survey found that:
- 78% of respondents would tell others to buy from a purpose-driven company.
- 66% of respondents would switch to purchase a product they typically buy elsewhere to a purpose-driven company (this number is 91% among Millennials).
- 73% of consumers will defend a purpose-driven brand if it is being talked about publicly in a negative way.
Q: Is there a CMO you look up to? And if so, why?
There are SO many CMOs I look up to that it's hard to choose. One incredible CMO that I had the pleasure of working with is Donna Vieira, the current Chief Commercial Officer at Sallie Mae. She's stellar at empowering teams, managing dynamics at large organizations, and marrying her care for customers with a data-driven approach to execution. Most impressive, she leads with empathy, kindness, and a true desire to understand.
Are you a female executive with a powerful story to share? Databird Journal is dedicated to elevating and amplifying the voices of women making an impact. If you want to share your story, don't hesitate to contact us.
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